Model-based Cooperative Acoustic Navigation and Parameter Identification for Underactuated Underwater Vehicles

TL;DR: Simulation and experimental results reported herein indicate the submerged UV position estimate from cooperative acoustic navigation with a kinematic model is poor and even unstable in the absence of ii, and an extension of a method to identify simultaneously UV dynamical plant model parameters and control-actuator parameters in 6 degree of freedom.

Abstract: This thesis reports novel theoretical and experimental results addressing two increasingly important problems in underwater robotics: model-based cooperative acoustic navigation for underwater vehicles (UVs) lacking a Doppler velocity log (DVL) and dynamicmodel parameter estimation for underactuated UVs, such as the now-ubiquitous class of torpedo-shaped UVs. This thesis reports an extension of a method to identify simultaneously UV dynamical plant model parameters (parameters for critical terms such as mass, added mass, hydrodynamic drag, and buoyancy) and control-actuator parameters (controlsurface models and thruster model) in 6 degree of freedom (DOF) to tolerate simulated sensor measurement noise representative of representative of real-world sensor data, as well as extensive numerical simulations to evaluate the sensitivity of the approach to sensor noise. The current state-of-the-art in one-way travel-time combined acoustic communication and navigation (cooperative acoustic navigation) is to utilize purely kinematic, constantvelocity plant process models together with an on-board bottom-lock DVL to provide frequent, high-accuracy velocity corrections. However, DVLs are expensive, power consumers, physically large, and limited to acoustic bottom-lock range, which restricts their use toO(10−100m) above the sea floor or beneath surface ice. Simulation and experimental results reported herein indicate the submerged UV position estimate from cooperative acoustic navigation with a kinematic model is poor and even unstable in the absence of ii